Discovery Pushes Back First HIV Case to Early 1950s

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Researchers have found what they believe is the earliest known case of HIV in plasma from an African man who died in 1959.

With a bit of molecular sleuthing, scientists have provided a glimpse at the earliest origins of the AIDS epidemic that has infected an estimated 30 million people around the world.

Dr. Toufu Zhu of the University of Washington in Seattle said HIV probably originated in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

"This is a decade or two earlier than previous estimates of the introduction of HIV-1 into the human population," he told the Fifth Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections yesterday in Chicago.

Dr. Zhu said his findings also suggest that all strains of HIV evolved from a single introduction of HIV into humans rather than from repeated transmissions from animals to humans, as some researchers had speculated. …

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